Behind the Hedge

 Behind the Hedge

I have an old violin I bought in 1972 and used frequently for playing in pubs and folk clubs. Its distinguishing feature is scratched into the varnish of the back – 2£. But it plays freely. The low clearance at the nut makes stopping easy. Through frequent use I am familiar with the curve of the bridge, and the separation of the strings. It has history**. But last summer it came unglued, and was inexpertly repaired by a wife-husband team who deal mostly with school violins. And now the pegs do not hold the tension of the strings. Caswells Strings is a much bigger concern with a well stocked showroom in town. My niece bought a violin from them 7 years ago and, more recently, I bought a 'mute' there. But I had not seen any sign of a 'craftsman' on their premises.  

I looked online for local violin makers (as I had some years ago in Mexico City – see my blog-post), and found an entry from a firm I had never heard of, in a tiny hamlet I had passed through many times; a mere handful of houses and a letterbox. I telephoned to make an appointment and was given instructions on how to find the "workshop", by turning off the lane 50 yards before the hamlet. 

I could not have been more surprised if I had found behind the hedge, in that little hamlet, a fully equipped and well manned space ship. As the door opened I heard a faint hum from the engines, two men in aprons; it could be about to take off.

One man was bent over the body of a double bass gripped in a large vice and was preparing to fit a new neck to the block. The other I must have caught between jobs, for he had nothing in his hands at the moment I entered. I looked around me, astonished.

It is amusing that the firm advertise themselves as 'Violin Makers', for they clearly specialise in the less romantic double-bass, and more often repair those than construct them from scratch. The founder of the firm had for many years been a professional bass player with a London orchestra till he retired some 30 years ago, to open the workshop. The 'firm' moved up from Henley 25 years ago. 

        There were some twenty basses lining the walls in various states of repair, but also a cello in the process of construction and a solitary violin, ready varnished but as yet unplayed.  

'David' looked at my pegs, applied chalk to all, gently reamed one peg-hole, trimmed a whisker off its peg to make it more circular in section, and drilled a new hole for the string further up the shank. All inside 40 minutes.  

(** If you are interested in the story of how I came by my old 2£ fiddle, drop me a line to: cawstein@gmail.com)

Padraig O'Reilly

 Padraig O'Reilly

As I approached the bus-stop this morning, hat-less and care-free, enjoying the noon-day sunshine, I looked around for my new friend Padraig O'Reilly. It has become one of my routines on alternate Wednesdays, after the coffee-house discussion in the Old Mill. This smartly turned-out young man caught my eye a few weeks back with his rubber knee-pads,  leather belt, high-boots and his taut, kung-foo, readiness. I was too polite to ask his business, but too curious to ignore his evident plea to be noticed. Perhaps a fantasy warrior. Or a prisoner on early release for good-behaviour. 

He had responded most courteously to my greeting in a lovely Irish lilt. I soon gathered his destination, his preference for the early shift, his ambitious saving-plans, to learn to drive and then to buy a car. He wanted to know the hours I used to work (9 – 5 in my case, or 8–6 when I accounted for travel). And my regular breakfast. I was charmed by his openness, and interest. I learned of his 'traveller' in-laws; and out-laws, as the case might be.  I realised that I was being measured against his own experience. 

This morning I complimented him on his neatness and he, in return, praised my turnout. He reached for a note-book in one of the conspicuous pockets hanging from his leather belt. As he thumbed through to the back page, I remembered that writing was one of his prouder accomplishments. There he had listed half a dozen lotteries, including Euro-millions, Set-for-Life and the "Post-code" Lottery, in which he had decided to invest £50 a week.  Forty pounds, he corrected himself, sheepishly, as he crossed out the "post-code" lottery; someone must have told him that it did not operate like the others. 

"You are feeling lucky, are you?" I teased. "A feeling in your bones?"

"Some years ago", I continued, "I thought I might run a lottery in which the punters would all give me £2 a week, I would pocket one pound and give them £1 back. For that is all these other lotteries are doing, isn't it," I continued; "except that they give a million pounds to one guy and nothing at all to a million other guys. (Maybe they give 50p to charity; and pay tax on the 50p they keep.) 

"You can't win if you don't enter", he replied. 

"Very true, very true," I conceded. "What would you say to this, then: every week you give me £50;  and after 4 weeks I give you £200?"

"You have to stick to the limits you can afford", he told me. "Never go over". 

"That is good advice" I agreed. 

He waved me onto the bus ahead of him, and I accepted. He likes to sit up front by the driver; by the door. 

Levelling Down

 Education Act – is it levelling down?

Lord Harris of Peckham (founder of the Harris Federation which runs over 50 academies) wrote in the Times “Failing schools are letting people down. We have to make sure we do not let our children down. The best way to address failing schools is to allow good academies to take over, and give them the freedoms that have made them successful." “Taking these away is madness."

In BBC's 'Today' programme (18th March 2025) Justin Webb quizzed Pat McFadden on the government's Education Act, currently going through parliament, challenging the government's negative attitude to Academies. It seemed to me that he was charging the government with spoiling successful schools. 

The words that seemed to elude him, the charge, was that of "levelling down". 

The Girl on the Bus

 The Girl on the Bus

I celebrated my retirement from Newcastle University by buying a round-the-world plane ticket, and arranging to work for a year in a bichemisty laboratory in Taiwan. My kind friend, gave me a 'Travel Diary' in which to capture my thoughts and impressions; though she by no means understood why I was leaving her for a year.  I found it, the other day, gazed at the cover for a few moments, before opening and leafing through a few pages. I stopped at an entry titled "The Girl on the Bus" where a book-mark fell out. The words on the page were powerfully evocative. 

It was three days before Christmas (though I had been warned several times that our Christmas and New Year were very minor days in the Taiwanese calendar). And it was a Sunday. I decided to make a modest trip out of the city of Taipei, perhaps to the extreme north of the island. I took the mass-transit-railway to its westerly terminus at Tamsui. From there I could catch a bus to take me round the coast to Shi-men. I would have no idea when to get off the bus except by keeping an eye on my watch and assuming the bus was running to timetable; an hour and 10 minutes to Shi-men.

The ramshackle bus set off from Tamsui bus-station shortly before 11.30. I, an obvious foreigner in his early sixties, had a good window seat on the left side of the bus. A considerable number of people got on at the next stop, and a local girl in her mid-twenties came and sat by me. 

I looked out seaward at the passing view, with my chin in my hand. We swayed against each other occasionally but it did not seem to matter; we had room enough; it was only momentary. 

After 20 minutes the girl started to search for something in her bag, and eventually brought out a little bookmark, or 'favour', made out of a dried leaf-skeleton decorated with bright yellow straw flowers, green straw leaves and a tiny blue straw butterfly. This she offered to me. I have it still, twenty years on, as a bookmark in my travel diary.

I am sure that my face fully expressed my surprise, gratitude, and embarrassment. I had got accustomed, over the months, to conversing almost without words, using glances, gestures, and guesses. Imagine, in a barbershop, I requested a trim and declining a massage, a shave, and a facial, all in gestures. 

"It is Chinese" she said in cautious English. 

"Indeed, very Chinese!" I agreed, delighted at the opening thus created. We got to talking, occasionally, and carefully. I told her I was was going to 'Shi-men'. She thought I would arrive at about 12.35. She was going to San-zhi. 

"I am meeting someone", she confided. "I have a 'date' ",  

"Really?", I asked, laconically. And again I am sure my face must have shown my surprise and my pleasure. Though not, perhaps, their cause. For it was her trusting directness that surprised and charmed me. And I am sure my face must have beamed my happiness, and gratitude; but could she read my best wishes for her future happiness in this exciting development?

No NATO boots in Ukraine

To the Editor of The Guardian.

Dear Sir,

    If Russia regards the presence of NATO, or European Union, troops in Ukraine as unacceptable conditions for long term peace, I think Europe should concede that. Of course, Russian troops would be similarly excluded. 

    The situation is very similar to the "Cuban Missile Crisis" of 16-28 October 1962, but with rôles reversed. The resolution achieved on 28th October, involved the Soviets dismantling their offensive weapons in Cuba, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement not to invade Cuba again. The US also dismantled their missiles in Turkey. 

    That crisis showed, de facto, that hostile missiles in Cuba were as unacceptable to the US as missiles in Turkey were to the USSR.  It similarly demonstrated that the US did not have the liberty to invade Cuba if the USSR did not have the liberty to protect Cuba. (Thank goodness, the US and the USSR with equal foresight both 'backed down'.)

    It is axiomatic that our allies  are reasonable and can be trusted, while 'the enemy' is un-reasonable and un-trustworthy; such is the the distorting lens of inevitable prejudice. But we can easily see that our enemy will be liable to the same distortion and see the same asymmetry.

My father, Ranyard West, in his last book ("International Law and Psychology", 1974) described a similar technique, which he called "inversion-substitution". He evolved it as a way of exposing the prejudices that inevitably cloud our judgements. He would take a piece of journalism that defended our actions abroad and attacked our enemy's, but would swap the names of the adversaries and their adjectives and adverbs, so that the value judgements were inverted. For example: "The {Russians} made a {generous} offer which the {cowardly} {Americans} spurned. Etc."  The result is revealing, shocking but salutary.

Ian West

Middleton Cheney,

BANBURY

OX17 2NB

Ukraine1

Kyiv and Ukraine: 1564-1795

    The word 'ukraine' means 'borderland' in proto-Slavic languages. It turns up as early as 1187 in a Kyivan Chronicle, in the sense of 'borderland'; so where the population of one polity thinned out to uninhabited Steppe and fronted another polity, they could each refer to their borderland or their 'ukraine'. 

    However, by early 1600s maps were appearing with the capitalised proper noun Ukraine. Thus "Vkraina" and "Kyovia" turn up together on the Radziwill map of 1613.  In mid seventeenth century, Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, a French cartographer working for the Polish army, published a map of "Ukrainska" in 1635 covering the area from the river Don in the east to the river Dniester in the west, and from Kyiv south to the Black (or Euxine) sea. His book Description d'Ukranie of 1651 was very widely read and republished in western Europe. 

Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595 - 1657) 

(This section is the expansion of a paragraph in my post Kyiv3 it tells how, in an effort to free itself from Polish control, what we now think of as Ukraine passed into the control of Moscow.)

    Born c. 1595, Chigirin, Ukraine

    Died  1657, Chigirin. (Aug. 16, [New Style])

Khmelnytsky was the leader of the Zaporozhian Cossack  rebellion (1648–57) against Polish rule in Ukraine that ultimately led to the transfer of the Ukrainian lands east and south of the Dnieper River from Polish to Russian control. In summary: the revolt, with the taking of Kyiv and Lwów, was initially successful but, after repeatedly being let down by the Islamic Crimean Tartars, Khmelnytsky made a treaty with the Russians (1654).

Although Ukrainian born, Khmelnytsky had been educated in Poland and had served with Polish military forces against the Turks. He had become chief of a Cossacks regiment at Czyhryn (Poland), but quarreled with the Polish governor there and fled (December 1647) to the fortress of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, a semi-military community that had developed from runaway serfs, bandits, and traders who had settled along the Dnieper River (Zaporizhzhia="below the rapids"). There he organized a rebellion among the Zaporozhian Cossacks and, with the support of the (Islamic) Crimean Tatars, marched against the Poles in April 1648. His victorious advance into  Kyiv won him additional support from the dissatisfied peasants, townspeople, and clergy of Ukraine, who joined him in a mass uprising that enabled him to enter Poland proper and seize Lwów (now Lviv) in October 1648.

After winning more victories in 1649, Khmelnytsky made peace with the new Polish king, John Casimir, concluding the Compact of Zborów (Aug. 18, 1649); its terms permitted him to establish a virtually independent Cossack principality in Ukraine. 

That treaty, however, satisfied neither the Polish gentry nor Khmelnytsky’s followers. He therefore renewed the war in the spring of 1651 but was defeated at the Battle of Beresteczko in June 1651 and was compelled to accept a new, less advantageous, treaty. 

In the face of a growing threat from Poland and forsaken by his Tatar allies, Khmelnytsky asked the the tsar of Russia (Tsar Alexis) to incorporate Ukraine as an autonomous duchy under Russian protection. The Russians were reluctant to enter into such an agreement, and it was not until October 1653 that they approved the request and Tsar Alexis sent a delegation to the Cossacks.

Pereyaslav Agreement   Only after the Cossacks had suffered a further disastrous military defeat (December 1653) did they  receive the Muscovite delegation at Pereyaslav and formally submit to “the tsar’s hand.” Two months later (March 1654), the details of the union were negotiated in Moscow. The Cossacks were granted a large degree of autonomy (under a Cossack 'Hetman'), and they, as well as other social groups in Ukraine, retained all the rights and privileges they had enjoyed under Polish rule. But the unification of Ukraine with Russia was unacceptable to Poland. It launched the Russo-Polish war ("Thirteen Years’ War") which ended (1667, Truce of Andrusovo see below) with the division of Ukraine between Poland and Russia, along the Dniepro river, but with Kyiv allocated to Russia .  

Early in the Thirteen Years’ War, the Russians invaded Poland, but Khmelnytsky, not content with his pact with Alexis, entered into secret negotiations with Sweden, which was also at war with Poland. He was about to conclude a treaty with the Swedes, placing the Cossacks under Swedish rule, when he died (1657).

Khmelnytsky had sought autonomy for his Cossack followers but succeeded only in devastating their formerly flourishing Dnieper lands and in subjecting them to the rule of Moscow, which gained control of Ukraine east of the Dnieper and gradually curtailed their liberties, until in 1764, when Catherine II (the 'Great') of Russia abolished the 'Cossack Hetmanate'. (See my post Kyiv 4). 

The Truce of Andrusovo (1667) established a thirteen-and-a-half year truce, signed on 9 February [N.S.] 1667 between the Tsardom of Russia and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. That this war trailed on for 13.5 years shows that neither side was vastly more powerful. In 1610, Poland had invaded Russia, captured Moscow, and taken the Tsar (Vasili IV) back to Poland in a cage.  But this truce seems to have  tipped the balance from Poland to Russia.

[Based on several articles in Encyclopedia Britanica and Wikipedia]

How bad is social inequality?

  How Bad is Social Inequality?

       Paul Johnson (director of  the 'Institute for Fiscal Studies') gave a talk at Clare College, Cambridge, on Thursday 2nd May 2024, titled:

 "Inequalities: what they are, why they matter, and how to address them". 

I was disappointed. I did not think he showed at all clearly why inequalities are bad. And he provided few ideas on how to sort them. 

He presented many inequalities; of income, education, wealth, health, inheritance, ethnicity, gender, geography. And he showed correlations; the unhealthy are poor, and the poor are unhealthy. But he was neither curious nor analytical about the causes of these inequalities, and their correlations. He seemed to assume a mechanism – the usual suspects; poor people are badly educated, are sick, die young and live in the north. It seemed to me insufficiently analytic; more like journalism than academia. And he scarcely touched on remedies.

It is not self-evident to me that inequality itself is a 'bad thing'. Some inequality could be called variety. Some people are tall, some short, some fast, others slow, some numerate others literate. 

Some inequality may be by choice. Some people may choose to live on a croft on Raasay, keep a cow and fish for lobsters. Some seek paid work, others may choose to remain unemployed in the north east of England, preferring that life to any alternative that they can imagine. After all, I do not want to make money on the Stock Market, nor by flying planes, nor by cutting people open. We should beware of making choices for other people. 

We are not all born equal. Inequality is inevitable. It can often seem 'unfair', and that unfairness can be painful to contemplate. Our idealism feels let down. Some people feel we have an inherent right to two legs, etc.; and that society has a duty to level up. I do not. But we do have an opportunity to correct the oversights of providence. Inequality can be mitigated, but not abolished. 

What, then, is positively bad for society about this God-given inequality, and how far should we go to lessen it? Does inequality simply indicate a wrong, or does it actually cause damage? Does it indicate cruelty; or actively breed indifference; or lead to bad government?

I believe that great disparity of wealth is bad for society in two different ways. The existence of very poor people dehumanises us. Their poverty hurts and rebukes us, unless we look away.  The very rich can also offend by causing envy in the less fortunate, as man is susceptible to envy. But envy alone is not enough reason to dispossess the rich. 

We are beginning to see how the very rich can cause positive harm. They can be hard to control. They can corrupt. Money confers power in so many ways. We are careful to give each adult an equal vote, but pay little attention to the fact that some voters can deploy a thousand or a million times the resource of the average voter. We are governed by the rich, as well as guided; we buy their newspapers, and watch their television channels. 

In particular, excessive wealth provides excessive means of making more wealth. Without explicit limits, the situation is mathematically explosive. Most people will use most of their resource most of the time. A billionaire will not; his wealth does not trickle down, significantly, to his hairdresser, or butler; it is salted away for his heirs. An inheritance tax (like the feudal 'fee') is essential. Unspent wealth should revert to the state. This has been said many times before. 

At a more mundane level, we should look for action points? Perhaps identify a metric that would indicate where state interference with the free market could be beneficially applied – for example we could monitor 'the increase in GCSE grades per GB£ spent, on the grounds that a pound spent in Ashington, Northumberland, would yield more marginal benefit than a pound spent in Haslemere, Surrey. Perhaps implement a focussed improvement of the transport infrastructure, e.g. in areas remote from London?

I was hoping Paul Johnson would have thought himself into such territory. He must be well informed on all aspects of taxation, and could, I am sure, make a significant contribution. I hope he can be encouraged to do so.

Sincerely, Ian West

(See also my post of 12 Mar 2012 –– "Taxing the Wealthy")